Kiln, Monadreela, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Kilns
Road construction has a long history of disturbing the past, and the building of the N8 Cashel Bypass and N74 Link Road South in County Tipperary proved no exception.
On sloping ground to the south of a small lake at Monadreela, a roughly 40-metre-square area was opened up in advance of the works, and what emerged was not a single coherent site but a cluster of overlapping activities, the kind of accumulation that suggests a place returned to across generations rather than used once and abandoned.
The most striking find was a keyhole-shaped pit, about 1.3 metres across and equally deep, discovered approximately 7 metres south of the lake. It was filled with red charred clay and charcoal, which points to its function as a kiln, a structure used to apply sustained heat for purposes such as drying grain, firing pottery, or processing other materials. Nearby, the excavators uncovered a concentration of pits and post-holes, traces of structures or enclosures that no longer survive above ground. Some 30 metres to the southwest lay two pit-burials, simple interments cut directly into the earth, while roughly 20 metres to the southeast was a fulacht fia, a type of site found widely across Ireland and typically interpreted as a prehistoric burnt mound used for cooking or heating water, involving fire-cracked stones dumped beside a trough. The proximity of the kiln to a water source, the burials, and the fulacht fia suggests this lakeside margin was a genuinely busy place at some point in the prehistoric or early historic period, though the precise dates of the various features and whether they were all in use at the same time remain uncertain from what the excavation could determine.